My hell

I hate being pregnant. Hate it. More than I hate WalMart. I hated it the first time, too, and just when I thought I couldn't hate it anymore...well, I just decided that I do.

A friend of mine told me that she never felt better than she did when she was pregnant. It must really suck being her. I hate the women who have that pregnancy glow. The women who appear to have endless amounts of energy and spunk. The women who look cute when they're pregnant. I feel like I look like a really fat Jeff Daniels.

I'm obsessed with Celebrity Baby Blog. I'm a pop-culture junkie, so how can I not be? But while I enjoy the voyeuristic nature of gawking at celeb photos, enjoying the opportunity to see and learn that Kelly Ripa and Jennie Garth look like real people when they're shopping at Target, I get pissed at the same time when I see pictures of people like Nicole Kidman and Jessica Alba, both pregnant, coming out of the gym after an alleged hard workout. CBB had a picture of Nic the other day supposedly leaving the gym after a spinning class. Her torso is about as wide as my jiggly tricep - how the hell can a baby fit in there? And hello - I can barely sit on our cushy sofa for 10 minutes before pregnancy-induced sciatic pain sends me waddling to the medicine cabinet, hoping that the Percocet Fairy left me a surprise to dull my aches, pains and brain cells. How is it possibly comfortable to sit on the crotch-crunching bicycle seats, to listen to some Bike Nazi instructor bark out orders to up the resistance without pregnancy hormones taking over and causing a mass homicide? Jessica Alba is about as far along as I am. She looks like she ate too much bread. Me? I look like I ate Jessica Alba. Now, I love me some exercise, and I can't wait until I can move quickly enough to get my fat ass back to the gym to lose every ounce of baby weight, but come on, girls - it's okay to let your bodies take over a bit.

I'm at the point in the 3rd trimester when you're quite certain that sudden death would be an adequate cure for the aches and pains. I can't remember the last time I slept longer than 45 minutes at a time. I have to pick up my stomach to roll over in bed...that is, if I'm lucky enough to have a night where it doesn't feel like my lungs are being trampled by a herd of elephants when I attempt to sleep on my side. I sleep with nine - 9 - pillows in my bed. I need to be propped up most of the night, because 75% of the time I can't sleep on my side as it feels like the very air is being sucked out of my body. When I sleep propped up, though, my hips become stiff and the sciatic pain kicks in after a while...right about the time I have to get up to pee, making the process of getting out of bed something that would likely pass as a popular circus side show.

Heartburn and cankles. Dry skin. Dry hair. Dry heaves. Yes, it's all worth it in the end, blah blah blah, but when you're so damn uncomfortable to the point of asking your pharmacist sister to score you some narcotics to make you forget about how uncomfortable you are, it's hard to see that light at the end of the tunnel.